TRUE CRIME CHRONICLES-Mike Rothmiller

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best selling author Mike Rothmiller. These classic works of journalism resurrect astonishing stories that will take the reader back to when these horrific tales mesmerized the nation. Some may find these articles and their descriptions of people in crimes shocking by today's standards, but they are representative of the most

colorful true crime stories of the day. True Crime Chronicles Volume one includes stories about Bell Gunnis, who had a pensiont for killing men and feeding them to her hogs, Doctor Holmes and his Murder Castle, the Bloody Benders, and Amelia Dyer, the Baby Farmer, the Darker Side of Wyatt Earp, and the forerunners of the American mafia, the Black Hand.

Imagine yourself accompanying these reporters, visiting the crime scenes, interviewing witnesses, and penning the stories of murder, lynchings, evil and swift frontier justice True Crime Chronicles. The book that we're featuring this evening is True Crime Chronicles Volume one, Serial Killers, Outlaws and Justice, Real crime stories from the eighteen hundreds, with my special guest journalist and author and historian Mike Rothmiller. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for

this interview. Mike Rothmiller.

I left the PD, it became a TV reporter, ended up being exec producer and hosting my own show on ESPN, and then along the line, I wrote. It's over twenty five books now and almost all of them, except for just a handful, are all true. And that's been my background. It's just fascinating looking into true crime and other issues that the government doesn't want you to know about secrets.

So this particular book, these two volumes, I came across that I was researching an incident for another book, and I got into the archives across the country and into the national archives and the archives in Britain and so forth, and I start coming across stories that were written about serial killers, murderers, and bizarre crimes that occurred in some to the seventeen hundreds and then into the eighteen hundreds. And I was fascinated by the stories because they were

written by journalists. They appeared in newspapers, but the way

they wrote the stories, they got into great detail. They were without question, the most knowledgeable people at the time investigating these let's say murders, because they would go out a lot of times with the detectives and they would find evidence a lot of times, and so they wrote very graphically about it, very well detailed, and so it is without question they were the best accounts of those crimes from the time, because court records are non existent

anymore from the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds in most cases. So these were the best sources of evidence and stories of those crimes at the time. So anyway, I went through it, and I kept finding more and more interesting stories. Then I contacted the publisher Wildly Press and said, hey, I've got these wonderful stories. What do you think And they said, immediately, let's do it. These things are just

too interesting not to put out in print. So that was the genesis of the books and they're doing extremely well.

they were for better term. Women would advertise in the seventeen eighteen ten to say, if you can't take care of your child or you want to give it up secretly, you give me at the time, like say equivalent to twenty dollars which would be several hundred several thousand, and I'll take care of your child, I'll raise it, or I will put it out for adoption and don't worry about it. So these women would do it as soon

as these people were paid. The woman left left a child there, they would kill the baby and throw the baby in the Thames River. And I've got stories of three women who were doing it and at best guests, they probably killed close to a thousand babies in that fashion. So that's one there were. I also have a chapter about lynchings that went on in the US, and that really struck me interesting because most people believe, and rightfully so, that the vast majority of lynchings were conducted by white

mobs on African Americans. They'd break them out of jail, they would capture them, they would hang him so forth. Well that was true. But also I have in their articles regarding African American groups who got together and went out and lynched African Americans for the same crimes, and so that's something that has really been forgotten in history that this occurred. So I have the stories about that.

I have stories about some women and a man who were basically accused of being a witch, which is in England, and how they were killed. Then I get into the Old West regarding the Irp family, Doc Holliday other ones like that, and primarily talking about the dark side of the York family the Dalton Gang. And then what I found was really intriguing was Bigfoot. The Renegade was a guy that led some piutes on raiding parties and he was just he was amazing. He was a giant for

the time. Physically they said he weighed over three hundred pounds solid muscle, was like six foot they guessed like six ft eight maybe a little bit larger, but just phenomenal story about him. And then the Black Hand, they were the forerunners of, if you want to say, the mafia when they really kind of changed names, that got

into other crimes in America. Soorry have that. I have the assassination of President Garfield in there, from what happened, how it went down, and the person who was caught and eventually executed. Then I have a good number of short stories that I found were truly fascinating. They're probably about twenty of them in there, of just various bizarre

crimes and the way people were treated back then. There's a dentist refused to be horsewhipped because he wrote a letter to a girl in another town that she thought was kind of embarrassing off color. So that was a crime, and so they decided to horsewhip this dentist and he wouldn't go. Ford says no, and he barricaded himself in his office, and then they finally parlayed and the girl said, Okay, if he comes down and apologizes me public, we won't horsewhip him, but he's got to leave town. And so

that was the deal that was cut. He came out and I'm sorry for the letter, and he left town. The very strange things and then some very strange murders that occurred back during the eighteen hundreds. There's one in particular that sticks out my mind is that a girl caused the boy to be murdered. She was walking by a small encampment of basically Mexican woodcutters. She got home tells her dad that one of the is some boy

there made some comment to her that was unseemly. They go back there and they forced the people there to whip this boy, and they whip him to death. And then the girl says, well, you know, he really didn't say that to me. I lied about it and just went on. Nothing happened. There was a wholesale slaughter of thirty four Chinese miners along the river that have their story in there and the people who were caught and

why they did it. Interesting one about two teenage female outlaws that were very young and they take off and they were selling alcohol to the Indians, which was illegal, and when the posse started going after them, they had to shootout with the posse and the only reason they surrendered because they ran out of AMMO And it was kind of looked at as a crime shooting out with the deputies, but it really wasn't handled that way. They just basically took him in sent him to a reform school,

you know something. Yeah, they're just very very strange stories in there, and one's about other people. There's a lot of axing going on, people being axed to death, and so there's stories about that. And then an interesting editorial I closed book with where the newspaper said, don't make heroes out of criminals, and that was based on a fellow that shot his girlfriend through the head and left her out next to a road. And they were kind of planed it up like they do today in some respects.

You know, they get a lot of coverage and they're kind of turning them into a hero and so forth. So there's just a lot a lot of stories like.

is unique aspect of these stories. Tell us some of the other things that were evident when you went through this information that really bring these stories to life like no other way.

crime scene to look around. And there's certain things that you would always keep confidential because only the killer would know, so then you can eliminate people who are giving false confessions. But in these cases, in these stories, the reporters in most cases were there. They accompanied the detectives or the

shriff or whoever was to the scene. They many cases, they found the evidence, some of the evidence, and they examined it, and then they went to a lot of the people who were arrested and they would get an interview from them fairly. Fascina, why did you kill so and so? Well, you know, he healed me five dollars and he went pay it back, So I took an axe and cut his head off, and they would just lay it out where today, well, for the last forty to fifty years, it said you got to mirandize people.

You can't do this, you can't do that. If they say they want an attorney, that ends everything, even if they say they want their mother. A lot of times the investigation, with the interrogation and so it brings back what an investigation was conduct how it was conducted in the eighteen hundreds, what went on before mirandizing, before you know, attorney's really got involved, how the cops would operate, and in many cases, the suspects of the arrest, thee they

would just absolutely come out and just confess proudly. And then when they were being taken to the gallows to be executed. You know, a lot of them just walked up there said hey, this is part of the game. Now I'm going to be hung. And they were very cool and collected, and they confessed once more before they

were hung. So it's just it brings that history to life by reading this, the words and the quotes that are in there, and the interrogations and so forth, it's just it's just a fascinating look at crime from over a century ago, how they were investigated, how people were treated as far as criminals. In most cases, there was very few appeals. If they were convicted in the say a county court and they were sends to death in

most cases there was no peel. That was it. And in many cases they had to hang them within thirty days or within three months, and that's what they did. They just waited and said, Okay, that's it, we're going to hang you now. And so it's just it's a real eye opener to see how things have changed.

bury them. In many cases, from all the stories I read about it is that she would generally plant something over where she buried the person, a small tree, some other plant, and that way she would know not to bury the next one there, because she would dig up the one that she buried the day before or the month before. So she was interesting. And then it appears once some people got on to her what she was doing, she had for a better term, a helper that would

help her now. And then Ray Lampierre and her house was burned down, and in the basement, once you know, everything was settled, they found three children, and she had three children. They found the body's three children. They found the body of a woman that was beheaded, and they didn't find the head, and so they were guessing, said, well, this might be Belle because the body size is about the same, but it may not because she was so ruthless.

She would have killed her three kids and also found somebody else killed that woman, took her head so she couldn't be identified, and it just took off. And so the mystery remains is that Bell was that her body or not in the basement of that burned out house. And so when you get into the details how she

operated and how she was discovered, it's truly fascinating. The detailed work that some other people did back then looking for relatives that they knew went past her house and then they started coming back to wait a minute, we

think she may be the person involved. And when it started closing in on her, that's when the house went down, and some believed at the time that it was her farm hand who held bury the bodies, basically killed her and burned the house down with the kids because there was a deal that went down and he didn't believe he was paid enough for it from this one killing. So it's just a fascinating look at a female serial

killer from that timeframe. And frankly, there aren't that many serial killers, as you know, most of them are males. So it takes you into the psychic of this woman and the way she brutally murdered people and just went about her business like she's slaughtering a hog. You know. Sometimes she would go out and feed them to her hogs in the Little Wallow area. And when the police finally were there looking around one of the hogs came up and had a human bone in its mouth it

was gnawing on. So yeah, she was pretty cruel.

Tell us a little bit about what these articles inform people about the Bender family.

And they had a house out in the middle of nowhere along this traveled dirt road, and when people are going by, primarily they'd invite men in to spend the night, single men if they thought they had any money with them, many valuables, and the daughter she would engage the person in the conversation. They had a table where they sat down deep. They'd always put the person's back to the

window that was opened directly behind them. And as the daughter, who was like early twenties, would engage the person in conversation, either the father or husband would come up behind them hit him in the back of the head with a hammer or an axe. There was a trap door just

below them. They'd pull the trap door, the person would fall into the basement, and if they were still alive, the mother was down there with a large knife for an axe, and she would behead the person, and then they would go ahead and take the valuables and so forth. And once again they would take the body out and bury them at night somewhere on their property, generally in there near the gardens and so forth. And this went on for some time, and it was like an early

version B and B. So it was very bloody. And when they were basically being detected what they were doing, they took off one night, all of them. And over the next few years there would be a story about a bender or somebody they thought was a bender. One of the men or one of the women were apprehended in North Carolina, and then they'd find out, no, that wasn't one of the Benders, and then there'd be another

one apprehended someplace else. No, that wasn't them. So the whole family just vanished, and to this day, nobody knows where they went. They split up or they stayed together, but they were never caught. And so it was again a very interesting story that you would see on forty eight Hours or something like that, but they escaped, and it's one of the great mysteries what happened to the Benders.

So it's a very detailed story, and it goes through a number of the people they killed, and how the bodies were found, in the condition of the bodies when they were discovered on the property, and a good number of bodies, and they probably did not find all the bodies if they buried them away from the house, because they just primarily looked around the house in that area when they were searching for bodies. So it's an interesting situation where it was a family that were serial killers.

They killed together and generally a single individual or two, and in this case it was a family, a husband and wife, their daughter and son in law. So it's kind of shocking when you read the story about the entire family.

police departments would have. That being said, one of the most fascinating stories in this incredible collection happens to be H. H. Holmes and headlines like turns out to be a veritable factory for murder, a sealed chamber, a steel vault, a crematory, and quickline gray A dark chaft found to run from the sealed room into the house built at Chicago by HH Holmes, who is charged with at least eleven murders

and suspected of many more. I wanted to say, or at least have this story demonstrate the power of the articles to not only just inform people of the details, but also what I thought was interesting is that there's so much difference between the folklore and the mythology of HH Holmes and how many victims, specifically in wild claims

about ovaries and young Maidens in this place. But I think with these articles, what I found was a very very much like a journalist today, a very grounded, non sillacious, detailed account of HH Holmes, his elaborate murder castle, but also lending credence to that he killed many more people than there was evidence for the police to prove of his murderous bent. And so can we talk about JH. Holmes and some of these fascinating articles.

was he built his castle. And the dimensions were it was one hundred and sixty two feet long and fifty feet wide, three stories high, and in it, if you've ever seen the like the Winchester Mystery House, you have doors opening the walls, stairways to nowhere. That's how this house was built. And he oversaw it. He swindled most of the work and bricks and so forth from people, so he didn't pay a lot for it. But it was built and there were rooms that led nowhere. There

were sealed rooms, there were mazes. It would be just think of a corn maze going through it. But it's all enclosed with various doors. And he knew how these secret passages worked through the house, but the detectives didn't when they first went in there. And also the workers. What he would do. He would hire some for a

while and then he would fire them. He turned them over constantly because apparently he didn't want anybody to know how this house really functions, the secret passages, the trap doors, the wiring, the vats to dissolve bodies and so forth. So he's a very strange, very cunning, and he knew a lot about law enforcement techniques at the time investigations, and he certainly knew how to dissolve bodies because in

his basement he had two vats. They found one had quicklime in it and the other, they're surmising it had some sort of oily acid in it. And he would put the bodies in there and dissolve them, and through time, they would even dissolve the bones. Then he was so bizarre. He had one guy articulate three the skeletons that he basically probably put him into the vat quicklime, and once all the skin and muscle tissue was gone, it was

just a skeleton. He removed him and he had the guy articulate them, so they were standing in different poses. And why he did that, you know, there were obviously trophies to him, but some of the other bodies were completely dissolved. He also had his own crematorium in his basement, and they found some human remains in there, some bones and so forth, but they have no idea how many people he cremated in his basement, how many people he

dissolved in his vats of acid in quicklime. But they did find some bones buried in his basement, human bones, and he was so cunning. He also took animal bones and mixed them with the human bones, and so he told them those were suit bones. If the police ever found them some of them, they did find that they were suit bones, but then they identified human bones in there.

He also traveled around the country, mainly on the east coast, and there was always somebody dying near him generally had something to do with him kids, or excuse me, somebody hired as a servant or to work around his castle.

So he was very, very strange. But the way the house was set up is that he had a pharmacy on the first level that went out onto the street, and he had the entire second third floor wired so when somebody walked down the hall, it would set off for a better term, and alarm in his office, so he knew where people were at at all times. In the house, they found rooms that had no ventilation whatsoever. Once the person was in there, they would suffocate, or there was a pipe that he would pump in natural

gas and the people would die that way. So he was very cunning. He had a number of ways that he would kill people, and the estimates go from eleven up to several hundred that he killed. And the reason it's so high is that he was set up for the World's Fair in Chicago, and the idea was to get people to come in there and they could spend the night in a room very inexpensively, and there were several hundred people who attended the World's Fair in Chicago

that never returned home. They never found the trace of them. So that's where the high number comes. And you know, it's anybody's guess, it really is. It was anybody's guest, then it's anybody's guests today the exact number that he killed. But he was extremely cunning, and you know, I guess he would be one of the top serial killers as far as being cool and collected during his time what he would do because these people would be obviously be seen going into his castle by some on the street,

but they never see them again. And so it's very well detailed. The way it's written is the stories. The reporters went through the house and interviewed the detectives that was who are involved in it, and they get into great detail about these secret rooms and the staircases and the vaults that he had, and how people were overcome when they went into the basement when they found this one vat that they said was oily, how they were

overcome with it. And then they talked about how he set up a fake gas company natural gas and so forth, and that he ran a natural gas line underneath for better term, a big vat of water hue, throwing some chemicals and then started up and he'd go look boom. He would set the gas a fire that was coming up out of the water, and he convinced these people he was a swilller, that he had these chemicals, whatever they were, and he could turn water into gas and burn it. And so doesn't mean he was a con

man and a mass murderer at the same time. And obviously he was extremely intelligent, but he was very, very deadly.

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to know what's in your multivitamin. That's why ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder to start your Ritual today. Now, we last spoke of HH Holmes and the incredible articles that really demonstrated the access that these reporters had at that time. Fascinating articles about one of the most fascinating

killers and subjects of all time, AHH. Holmes. You also talked about the baby baby farms and the reason why people would utilize these baby farms, and tell us a little bit more about this baby farming in terms of the numbers that were you know, if records can be believed, what kind of numbers are we talking about. Tell us more about baby farming.

And so these baby farmers, they would advertise in the papers in London and other areas that for whatever the fee would be a nominal fee, they will take your child, no questions asked, and they will raise the child as their own, or they will see that it is adopted

into a good family. So there was no shortage of women at the time willing to give up their child, and so they would meet with them, generally at their homes and they would hand over the child, most cases they were infants, with some whatever clothing they had, which was limited, and pay the fee, and then they were assured that the child would be adopted or raised, and just when they would leave, sometimes within a matter of an hour, if not sooner, these women would strangle the baby,

put it into a sack, put a rock in the sack, and then throw it into the river. And the way they were discovered is that sometimes they didn't tie the sack and the body would float out. And so down river from this area they start finding baby bodies floating up along the shore and so forth, and the police start backtracking and that's how they came across these people. In most cases, as they backtracked and they start going from how the house and it wasn't like a major city,

you know, the kind of a rural area. And so they finally determined who the people were, the women, and they have the interrogations in there in many cases, in some of the interrogations from the trial, and most of the women ended up they were hung for their crimes. And body count they would guess was well into the hundreds, if not thousands, because these were only three of the women that they were able to arrest and try. Other ones were never detected. From other articles I read, they

were just you know, bodies turned up. But they couldn't determine where the child came from. It just washed up on the bank or somewhere. So these women were very diabolical, and for a woman, it was kind interesting because they were very cruel. They would just take this baby in and without that instinct that most women would have about a child, they just strangle them. They looked at them as a little farm animal. They were just slaughtering and

they just would slaughter them and toss them away. And in one person, this one baby farm or having there. When the police finally arrested her went to her house, she had over three hundred pounds of baby clothing. And now you have to think about that, how many babies that would represent, because in most cases they didn't have a lot of outfits. They had maybe one or two that they would give to the woman when they turned the baby over. So three hundred pounds of clothing and

baby clothing adds up to a large number. So it's just shocking when you read the stories that these women were. They were serial killers at the time, and there were more than one. There were quite a few in England that we're doing it, and so you look at it was an industry that was run on murdering babies, you know. So it's just it's a shocking and fascinating story and it's certainly an eye opener to the cruelty of a lot of people.

thieves and bandits. So tell us a little bit more about these fascinating articles and the backstory about the Erp family and dalk Holiday.

it turned out, the IRBs warn't that clean. And you know, dating way back when Wyatt was younger, I have his an arrest warrant that was issued for Wyatt because he was a horse thief and what he did. Instead of being prosecuted, he took off and ran in the Indian territory. They never caught him. But they would go from town totown, as the story goes that most people know that they would go from town totown. They were lawmen and you know, fighting the bad guys all the time, and then there

was a shootdown Tombstone and so forth. Well, a lot of that's true. Sometimes when they went to a new town, it's because they got chased out of the last town because of criminal activity, and so they'd take off and in many cases the jobs that they could find that were open immediately was being a marshal or a share for deputy so forth, and so to earn some money while they got the lay of the town, they would

take a job as a sheriff, marshall, whatever. And what their main gig was is that they were into robbing stage coaches where the other ones is the people were cattle thieves, orce thieves and so forth, and so they knew who the other criminals were. And when they were in Tombstone, yeah, they one was acting as a marshall and so forth, but they were also going out during

the day. If they would learn that a stage was coming in, primarily a Wills Fargo stage that had cash or gold on it, they would go out and rob it. Then they would come back to town and the stage would come in and they basically say, hey, we were robbed, and the IRPs would say, well, let's put together a posse and go out and find those esperadoes. So they put together posse. They would go out look for themselves.

They never found themselves and they'd come back. And the way that that scheme was broken is that the agent they had at Wells Fargo who would tell them when a load was coming in a load of gold or something finally broke down and start talking, and that's when the towns start going after the IRPs. And the IRPs left Tucson along with not Tucson, you know, they left, Yeah, Tombstone with the doc Holiday. And another story that I found, which just surprised me, is that early on, prior to this,

the younger sister of the Herbs married. She basically eloped, and they did not approve of this, so they took out after her. And they found her in the next town with her husband and Ike Clanton which you remember that name from the Ok Corral, and they just start shooting into the hotel where they were at. Well, they missed Ike and they hit the sister. She was wounded, so I grabs her, runs out the back, gets on

the horse holding her, carrying her, takes off. They're in pursuit of them, and he gets up to a mine which is supposed to have been a load of Irish miners there, and he runs in the mine carrying his wounded wife and tells them these guys are chasing me. They want to kill me. They shot my wife. So the Herbs arrive with Holiday. The miners come out anywhere between twenty and thirty miners come out their arm and say we want him, and they say no, no, no, no, no,

you're not taking him. You're not getting her. So they chat for a while and they decide to have a duel ike Clanton against one of the younger irt brothers, and whoever wins for a bed term gets the girl. So they the one IRB brother fires at Clanton, misses, Clanton fires at him, kills him, and the miners say, hey, fair fight. That's the end of it. And so the IRPs get out ready to leave, and unfortunately Clanton's wife

she died from that gunshot wound. So that goes on, and so there's after that, there's always some obviously animosity between the two. And then they end up down in Tombstone where Ike is running basically some cattle thieves the Clantons, and then the IRPs are doing their stagecoach robberies, and then they end up shooting out at the Ok Corral, and at that stage everybody kind of takes off. So the whole thing about the IRBs, the story that most

people know, is just it's not accurate. And then Wyatt eventually ends up in San Francisco and he's basically the referee in this heavyweight boxing match, and there's no doubt he threw the fight for twenty five hundred dollars for this guy that basically knocked out the other guy, and the crowd went crazy, they're throwing things up on the stage. Everybody believed and probably still to this day, that Wyatt was paid off and that he threw the match to

this one guy. And so Wyatt's long history was tarnished all the way along from day one when he was young until his death. But it was never it's never really been reported in current media or relatively new media, or in movies or in books about him. All of that has been left out. And so when I read this, I found it so interesting and it rewrote history. I said, these stories of the Europs have to be put into the book. Then there's some questions said, well the stories

accurate and not. Well, yeah, you have to look at the accuracy because that's where all historians would be getting their informations from these old articles. And then Wyatt actually sued a newspaper and I've got a quote. It's very funny because he talks about it was a fake story,

it's fake news and so he sued that newspaper. And so if a lot of these stories were not true, he probably would have sued them at the time, but instead he would always take off him and his brothers and go to the next town for the next state. So fascinating story about the Irk family that people are completely unaware of.

immigrant trains along Snake River in early days. Yes, a little bit more about what you found he was I never knew about.

an Indian or a white woman. And he was just a giant, as you described in six foot eight three fifty pounds, and he was just a giant of a man. And this story is so fascinating because he led a group of a band of Payoute Indians along that area and they were conducting raids all the time, and they were slaughter people. So in some ways he was a

serial killer too. But he would slaughter the people. He would take their riches, him and his band of Piutes, and then they would take off and he'd come back. And what was so fascinating about is that he didn't write a whole They said there was no horse that was large enough for him, and so he would run where his other the Piu band, they were on horses in many cases, but he would run and he would keep up with them, or he would outpace them. And in the story one of these guys who actually they

killed him, they ran him down a conning. He would just stay well ahead of them. They were on horseback, they're on his track. But he would just run and run and run and outrun them. And when they finally found him, cornered him. They shot him a number of times with rifles and didn't kill him. And so they start talking to him and they get his story, and so the guy is relating the story that Bigfoot was telling them about. But it was Bigfoot the renegade, operating

up in that area around the Snake River. A huge, giant man and relatively intelligent when you read his statements what he was talking about. He was fairly intelligent. But he was a brutal killer and in many cases he would just kill with his bare hands. He didn't need a gun, he didn't need anything else. He would just kill the people with his hands. So it's a fascinating story. And when I first came across it, I read the headline Bigfoot, and I said, what's this? You know, I

was thinking of something in Washington State. Instead it was this renegade, and it actually was a more interesting story. So Bigfoot the Renegade his entire stories in there, and it is quite fascinating because it's somebody who was a in some respects a major part of history, but nobody's ever heard about.

And the reason being was that they were upset because some of the people that were for better term farming and had these African Americans as hands and slaves there and so forth, that they would kill them year round if they were upset about something. And they said that no, this is wrong because it impacts the harvest season. That you should not be able to kill blacks, even though

it's understandable and it's justified. They said, you should not be able to kill blacks during certain months when the harvest that's coming in, because that would impact the economy of that region. And at first when I read it, I thought, well, wait a minute, is this some kind of weird, bizarre, sarcastic humor. And then I went back, I said, no, this from the editorial board at the newspaper,

and they're dead seriously. And then I pulled other editorials from the same newspaper, and I realized that now they weren't joking. They're dead serious, that there should be a hunting season like there is on other game animals for blacks during that timeframe. It's just it's beyond shocking when you read it.

this stuff. And this editorial board had enough of that and they said, which was interesting, they said, hey, this guy is a criminal. He murdered this girl, and we have to quit making heroes out of criminals. They're criminals. So the community stopped talking about him like he's a great guy and fascinated by him. And they wrote this editorial back in eighteen hundreds, and it was rather interesting

reading it because it also applies to today. You see how people, well any serial killer like Charlie Manson the rest of them, and a nightstalker, when they're in prison, they receive love letters and offers to marry them and so forth, and it's the same sort of thing said, don't make these people heroes and don't give them the notoriety. And so that's how I finally, that's how I ended volume one of these true crime chronicles.

And then I have stories about Butch Cassidy's Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the execution of his conspirators, and then other ones regarding some really interesting short stories about various crimes, and

the two of them are really strange. One is they talked about the deadly blue gum Negro and it was believed then that African Americans who had blue gums were as venomous as a rattlesnake, And there are a lot of stories in this how people got in fights, they were bitten by somebody of blue gums and they died a short time afterwards. And some of these people who bit other ones were executed. So it's a fascinating look at what people believed at the time, the craziness of it,

and how people were treated. But I ended the book with something that is a story that is just as well as strong today as it was when it was written. And it was during the Civil War, and this woman she was acting as a Civil War spy. She was in Washington, d C. She ad dress up as a man and she would take supplies to the Confederates and she was caught several times by Union troops as she was trying to go across the Potomac, or she got across, and they knew she was a spy, and so they'd

arrest her as a spy. And spies at that time were hung or they were shot. And every time she was caught, a letter would come down, a message from the Secretary of War somebody else in Washington, d C. To release her. And the general that had her in custody was always what the hell's going on here? This

is strange. She is a spy. They kept releasing her. Well, I did a lot of research on her and came up with the reason why is that she was running a whorehouse in Washington, D C. And an abortion clinic at the time, which was illegal, And so her girls and she they were servicing many of the politicians in Washington, D C. And they were also providing abortion services. When these senators and cabinet members, when their girlfriends mistress would

get pregnant, they would perform the abortion. So this is why she was released all the time because they were trying to keep this quiet and it went on. But what was so bizarre about that is that in court she was put on trial for murder and she went after the sky that she was blackmailing, and he was setting on for better term of a little street car and she walks up and she shoots at him, She misses him, kills the guy next to him, had nothing to do with him, and she wounds this other guy.

So she goes on trial for that, and the attorney brings up in court and the judge talks about is that, well, my client was basically mentally ill and just says, well, how how ill was she? And he says ill enough to get off any criminal charges. Yeah, So yeah, it just told me that's what happens today. You know, the insanity please a lot of time, because when I was a cop, I saw diminished capacity and stuff in a lot of horrendous cases, you know, trying to get the

person off and that's how the game is played. It's theater in court in most cases. And so it was crazy. But the bottom behind was is that she was servicing probably a lot of captain members, maybe some senators herself, and not to hear girls. And so that's why she was always released when she was actually a Confederate spy

and she was caught. So it's a story that is as strong today as it was then because as most people know in Washington, d c. If you can, it's good to have a politician in your pocket, but ultimately it's better to have a politician in your bed, you know, for some woman like that to control them.